snydeq writes: Companies are doggedly pursuing the next big thing in technology, but nothing seems to be pointing to the right way these days, claims the legendary Steve Wozniak. The reason? 'You tend to deal with the past,' replicating what you know in a new form. Consider the notion of computing eyeware like Google Glass: 'People have been marrying eyewear with TV inputs for 20 years,' Wozniak says. True innovation, Wozniak claims, becomes more human, more personal. People use technology more the less it feels like technology. 'The software gets more accepted when it works in human ways — meaning in noncomputer ways.' Here, Wozniak says, is the key to technology's role in the education system.

I wanted something like this for quite a while, except my primary use cases are for preventing inactivity-related actions: 1) don't lock the screen if I'm still at the computer, regardless of the inactivity timeout; and 2) don't dim the screen if I'm looking at it. I'm probably reading and I like the brightness level just the way it is.

All I can say is a subjective "smooth enough". And it's been actually supported for quite a while by all major browsers except IE. And IE9 will come with hardware-accelerated canvas (it was covered on/. not long ago), and Firefox has it partially working in trunk.

Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.

Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.

And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers, which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap, includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.

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CmdrTacoon Monday June 14, 2010 @11:00AM
from the why-stop-there dept.

1sockchuck writes "Stealthy startup SeaMicro has unveiled its new low-power server, which incorporates 512 Intel Atom CPUs, a load balancer and interconnection fabric into a 10u server. SeaMicro, which received a $9.3 million government grant from DOE to develop its technology, says its server uses less than 2 kilowatts of energy — suggesting that a single rack with four SeaMicro units and 2,048 CPUs could draw just 8 kilowatts of power. Check out the technical overview, plus additional coverage from Wired, GigaOm and VentureBeat."

soDean writes: Google, Mozilla and Opera announced a new open video format today called WebM. As part of the WebM project, Google is is freely licensing the VP8 compression technology. This new open video format will use a modified Matroska video container (.webm). WebM format support is available today in Firefox, Chromium, and Opera development builds. All videos that are 720p or larger, uploaded to YouTube after May 19th, will be be encoded in WebM. The Open Video Alliance has the full scoop.Link to Original Source

atamido writes: Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty free. They are packaging in with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available here.

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CmdrTacoon Thursday May 06, 2010 @10:10AM
from the moon-is-made-of-ham dept.

davecl writes "Today the first full science results from the Herschel Space Observatory were released, including results ranging from the formation and evolution of galaxies to the detailed physics of star formation. Details can be found from The European Space Agency, the BBC, and the Herschel mission blog that I help maintain. Briefer reports, covering rather more of the science, can also be found under the #eslab2010 hashtag on Twitter."

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samzenpuson Sunday May 02, 2010 @06:02PM
from the knights-who-say-free dept.

unixfan writes "Georg Greve, developer of Open Document Format and active FOSS developer, has received a knighthood in Germany for his work. From the article: 'Some weeks ago I received news that the embassy in Berne had unsuccessfully been trying to contact me under FSFE's old office address in Zurich. This was a bit odd and unexpected. So you can probably understand my surprise to be told by the embassy upon contacting them that on 18 December 2009 I had been awarded the Cross of Merit on ribbon (Verdienstkreuz am Bande) by the Federal Republic of Germany. As you might expect, my first reaction was one of disbelief. I was, in fact, rather shaken. You could also say shocked. Quick Wikipedia research revealed this to be part of the orders of knighthood, making this a Knight's Cross.'"